Apparently, the black revolt of the 1950s-1960s was a surprise, which to me sounds like a bunch of bologna. Due to the nation’s history of discrimination, segregation, and racism, it seems like the Civil Rights Movement should’ve been a given, that it would happen and everyone would know it was happening. Granted, I wasn’t alive when it happened, I wasn’t alive to see both sides, and it isn’t common culture now to discriminate and assume superiority based on race, but to me, it shouldn’t have been a surprise.
Zinn details all of the various forms of art, poems, and songs that conferred ideas of freedom and equality that many black artists wrote and did to convey their discontent and feelings towards their ancestry and history. All of these pieces of art show how their past and their ancestors’ pasts aren’t just memories, they are still parts of their lives and will/should remain parts of everyone’s lives until equality isn’t fought for anymore – it’s a given part of life.
One thing I found particularly interesting in “Slavery Without Submission” was the idea that poor whites only sometimes helped blacks, while blacks risked it all to help the suffering whites around them. I think if someone truly understands the concept of being on the outside or disregarded as a human, they would do whatever works to help another so that that one person doesn’t experience the same things they do. In this sense, I’m low-key shocked that the poor whites, who were also under attack (but for land) by the wealthy whites, did not do more to help the blacks that were truly suffering everyday, the same people who risked beatings and sometimes their lives to help them. The slaves’ values of kinship and community showed through their willingness to help those that sometimes didn’t help them, seen through the one example that Zinn gives the readers, of the slave that was beaten because he gave a sick, poor white neighbor food because the neighbor was sick.
I agree with you that the “surprising” nature of the rebellion of the 50s/60s sounds inaccurate and honestly impossible. We can look at the concept of permanent inequality to help explain this phenomenon– African Americans were portrayed to lack the intellectual capabilities white people had– so they were “not expected” to lead such a revolutionary movement.